Quote of the Day

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

• Aldous Huxley, 1927.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn – Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major (9’45”)

Link

Stamps to mark 25th anniversary of Father Ted sitcom

I could never understand why so many people — including my kids and their mother and many members of my extended family — loved the Father Ted sitcom. Given that they are all Irish I could hadly acuse them of enjoying racist trash. So I just had to grin and bear it.

And now, look what’s happened!

A quarter of a century after it first aired, Father Ted, one of television’s most loved sitcoms, has officially stamped itself on popular culture.

Ireland’s post service, An Post, issued a set of stamps on Thursday to celebrate its characters and one-liners and to mark the show’s 25th anniversary.

Phrases forever associated with Craggy Island, the fictional home of three wayward priests and their housekeeper, now adorn four stamps.

Guardian story.

People Drawn to Conspiracy Theories Share a Cluster of Psychological Features

Useful Scientific American article on the experience of the cognitive Stephan Lewandowsky when he did research on why people believe conspiracy theories.

About six years ago the cognitive scientist had thrown himself into a study of why some people refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence that the planet is warming and humans are responsible. As he delved into this climate change denialism, Lewandowsky, then at the University of Western Australia, discovered that many of the naysayers also believed in outlandish plots, such as the idea that the Apollo moon landing was a hoax created by the American government. “A lot of the discourse these people were engaging in on the Internet was totally conspiratorial,” he recalls.

Lewandowsky’s findings, published in 2013 in Psychological Science, brought these conspiracy theorists out of the woodwork. Offended by his claims, they criticized his integrity online and demanded that he be fired. (He was not, although he has since moved to the University of Bristol in England.) But as Lewandowsky waded through one irate post after another, he discovered that his critics—in response to his assertions about their conspiratorial tendencies—were actually spreading new conspiracy theories about him. These people accused him and his colleagues of faking survey responses and of conducting the research without ethical approval. When his personal Web site crashed, one blogger accused him of intentionally blocking critics from seeing it. None of it was true.

The irony was amusing at first, but the ranting even included a death threat, and calls and e-mails to his university became so vicious that the administrative staff who fielded them asked their managers for help. That was when Lewandowsky changed his assessment. “I quickly realized that there was nothing funny about these guys at all,” he says.

Of course all lives matter, but that’s not the point

Memorable post by Dave Winer:

If when someone says Black Lives Matter you quickly respond with All Lives Matter then I have a few things I want to say to you.

At least pause for a moment before replying and ask yourself why this person is saying Black Lives Matter. Of course they know and agree that all lives matter. But that isn’t what they’re saying. They’re saying that Black Lives Matter not because they’re more important than white lives or cop lives, which seems to be how you’re interpreting it, but because a lot of black people are being killed and the justice system does not seem to care.

I think we all know that if Trayvon Martin, for example, had been a white teen, and George Zimmerman had been a black adult man, the outcome would have been different. But because he was black, and black lives don’t matter, Martin is dead and Zimmerman is free.

There have been a seemingly endless series of graphic stories, many of them on video, of white police killing black people, and getting off. I suspect this has been going on all along, but now with the wide use of smartphones, we’re actually seeing it, visually, as we couldn’t have seen it before. Now it’s not their word against a cop’s. The video provides testimony that is impossible to refute.

If you were black, and you saw this happening, you might be inspired to do more than say something like Black Lives Matter. Your rage and fear might overwhelm you. So the first thing I would say to a black person who said Black Lives Matter is thank you for containing the rage you must feel, that I would feel if I were in your shoes, that I feel in a small way on your behalf, at the cruelty and callousness of our system and culture. Then I’d ask if there was anything I could do to help.

The User Always Loses: How did the Internet get so bad?

Lisa Borst’s perceptive review in The Nation of Joanne McNeil’s new book, Lurking: How a Person Became a User, “a conversational and idiosyncratic account of the past 30 years of online life that reminds us that the Internet didn’t have to become what it is today”.

Long read of the Day.

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Made my day this morning!

Quote of the Day

“Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true”.

• Samuel Johnson

Musical alternative to this morning’s radio news

Glen Campbell playing the William Tell Overture

Link

And if this doesn’t leave you gibbering, then I don’t know what will.

How a brand of chalk achieved cult status among mathematicians

Improbable but lovely story — with a happy ending… Who knew that mathematicians take chalk so seriously?

Link

Tony Connelly on Phil Hogan’s resignation from the European Commission

Connelly is Ireland’s most astute political commentator. This morning he was on song about the resignation of Ireland’s European Commissioner.

Phil Hogan’s resignation is a very dramatic development, marking a decisive moment in one of the most fractious periods in Irish politics.

It is almost unprecedented for a European Commissioner to resign. He has held one of the most important European portfolios at a time when international trade has been at the forefront of historic upheavals in global politics, from Brexit to trade wars with the United States and China, and even how the Covid-19 pandemic could change the way trade operates.

But it was that very pandemic which caused his downfall. His defensive, then fragmented response to the Clifden golf dinner raised the hackles of many Irish people angered at what were seen as double standards, and dismayed the coalition government, which feared that the critical message on curtailing infections was being drowned out by the crescendo of public anger over the controversy.

Phil Hogan did apologise, at times profusely, first in a statement, and then during an RTÉ News interview. But his position was damaged further by his defence that a negative Covid-19 test absolved him of the 14-day period of restricted movements. Official statements suggested otherwise.

Despite a passionate appeal for forgiveness and to be able continue his work as trade commissioner, the Government still could not express full confidence in him, and this put Dublin on a potential collision course with the European Commission.

That collision has been averted. Phil Hogan has chosen to resign himself.

(Readers puzzled by the “golf dinner” business may find this report helpful.)

The stock market is crazily out of sync with the real world.

From Quartz this morning…

Should we be worried about a stock bubble? It seems odd to discuss irrational exuberance when the economy is anything but exuberant, but these are unlikely times. To help answer this question, consider Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles, a new book by William Quinn and John Turner. Their research suggests there are three necessary ingredients for a financial firestorm: speculation, marketability (how easy it is to buy an asset—think innovation in stock trading apps, or the brainiacs who brought us mortgage-backed securities), and credit.

Quinn and Turner find that asset booms are happening more frequently, and that government policy—meant to make housing more affordable, or shed unsustainable debts, for example—is often the spark that lights the financial fire. If ultra-low interest rates and the boom in brokerage apps like Robinhood are any indications, a bubble in equities could be inflating as we speak.

Is there a pattern here? For example, social media make it easy for anyone to say virtually anything online — and have it spread like wildfire. The result: a polluted public sphere which distorts perceptions of political and social reality. Apps like Robinhood make it possible for anyone to buy and sell shares instantly. The result: an asset bubble which is totally removed from economic reality.

Citizen Lab report on Chinese censorship of Covid news

The Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto carried out daily tests on WeChat censorship practices, collecting 2,174 censored keywords between January to May 2020. The data provide a window into censorship practices related to COVID 19 on WeChat, the preeminent chat application in China. The country’s censorship regime is highly distributed, organised through a process of “intermediary liability” in which the platforms themselves largely decide what content to censor and how to do so.

OnWeChat, censored keywords and images are removed from chats without any notice to the sender or receiver — making censorship decisions largely opaque. The Citizen Lab’s daily experiments involved automatically sending thousands of news articles between WeChat accounts controlled by the Lab and then observing which of those triggered censorship, thereby allowing researchers to observe exactly what content is being censored on a daily basis. After finding a news article that was censored, they then identified which combination of keywords may have triggered its censorship.

Findings

The first period (December 31, 2019 to March 2020) covered the emergence and spread of COVID-19 in China. Censored keywords focussed on:

• early warning of the virus,
• interactions between China and the WHO)
• general health information
• criticism of China’s response to COVID-19.

The second period (beginning in March 2020) covers the phase in which the virus becomes a pandemic and goes global. During this phase, the focus of censored content went beyond issues in China proper to cover:

• international responses to COVID-19
• international criticism of the Chinese government.

The third and final phase focused on the period in which the United States became the global epicentre of the pandemic. Censored content in this period included:

• conspiracy theories,
• U.S. criticism of China’s political system,
• critical and neutral references to China-US relations, and
• U.S. domestic politics.

Report

Great research. Reminds me of the work that Gary King and his colleagues at Harvard have done on examining how the Chinese censorship system works in practice.

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From small beginnings…

… come mighty oaks. Found this on the pavement near our house yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”Actually, I am a golfer. That is my real occupation. I never was an actor; ask anybody, particularly the critics.”

• Victor Mature

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio new

Joan Baez & Paul Simon – The Boxer – Live 2016 NYC at 75th – Birthday Celebration

Link

A TikTok Ban Is Overdue

Tim Wu in the NYT with what is, for him, an unfamiliar argument: basically just because Trump is an idiot, that doesn’t mean that everything he does is wrong.

The United States government does not usually block or censor lawful websites, foreign or domestic, because it subscribes to the idea that the internet was designed to be open and connect everyone on earth. On its face, then, President Trump’s recent treatment of the Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat, which he threatened to ban from the United States unless they could find American buyers, looks close-minded and belligerent.

There is more to this situation, though, than meets the eye. Were almost any country other than China involved, Mr. Trump’s demands would be indefensible. But the threatened bans on TikTok and WeChat, whatever their motivations, can also be seen as an overdue response, a tit for tat, in a long battle for the soul of the internet.

In China, the foreign equivalents of TikTok and WeChat — video and messaging apps such as YouTube and WhatsApp — have been banned for years. The country’s extensive blocking, censorship and surveillance violate just about every principle of internet openness and decency. China keeps a closed and censorial internet economy at home while its products enjoy full access to open markets abroad.

The asymmetry is unfair and ought no longer be tolerated. The privilege of full internet access — the open internet — should be extended only to companies from countries that respect that openness themselves.

China can’t have it both ways, and it’s about time we enforced that rather than appeasing Xi Jinping & Co.

Kamala Harris has a long record of being pally with Big Tech

Yeah, well I wondered about that. Today’s NYT article is not exactly reassuring.

For Ms. Harris, a Bay Area politician, connections to tech have been essential and perhaps inescapable. In past campaigns — her two elections to be attorney general, her successful run for the Senate and her failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination — she relied on Silicon Valley’s tech elite for donations. And her network of family, friends and former political aides has fanned throughout the tech world.

Those close industry ties have coincided with a largely hands-off approach to companies that have come under increasing scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers around the world. As California’s attorney general, critics say, Ms. Harris did little to curb the power of tech giants as they gobbled up rivals and muscled into new industries. As a senator, consumer advocacy groups said, she has often moved in lockstep with tech interests.

Now that she is the running mate of Joseph R. Biden Jr., tech industry critics worry that a Biden administration with Ms. Harris would mean a return to the cozy relationship that Silicon Valley enjoyed with the White House under President Barack Obama.

Although vice presidents rarely set policy, as a former state attorney general Ms. Harris is expected to have a say in Mr. Biden’s political appointments at the Justice Department, including officials who oversee antitrust enforcement. She could also have a significant influence on tech policy in a Biden administration, since Mr. Biden has largely focused on other issues.

Way back in January, Biden was very forthright on these matters in an extended interview with the NYT’s editorial team. Here’s the relevant passage:

Charlie Warzel: Sure. Mr. Vice President, in October, your campaign sent a letter to Facebook regarding an ad that falsely claimed that you blackmailed Ukrainian officials to not investigate your son. I’m curious, did that experience, dealing with Facebook and their power, did that change the way that you see the power of tech platforms right now?

Biden: No, I’ve never been a fan of Facebook, as you probably know. I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think he’s a real problem. I think ——

CW: Can you elaborate?

No, I can. He knows better. And you know, from my perspective, I’ve been in the view that not only should we be worrying about the concentration of power, we should be worried about the lack of privacy and them being exempt, which you’re not exempt. The Times can’t write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But he can. The idea that it’s a tech company is that Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For Zuckerberg and other platforms.

(Footnote: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act says that online platforms aren’t held liable for things their users post on them, with some exceptions.)

CW: That’s a pretty foundational laws of the modern internet.

That’s right. Exactly right. And it should be revoked. It should be revoked because it is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false, and we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy. You guys still have editors. I’m sitting with them. Not a joke. There is no editorial impact at all on Facebook. None. None whatsoever. It’s irresponsible. It’s totally irresponsible.

CW: If there’s proven harm that Facebook has done, should someone like Mark Zuckerberg be submitted to criminal penalties, perhaps?

He should be submitted to civil liability and his company to civil liability, just like you would be here at The New York Times. Whether he engaged in something and amounted to collusion that in fact caused harm that would in fact be equal to a criminal offense, that’s a different issue.

So, we’ll see…

Summer books #10

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, Faber & Faber, 2010.

This is one of the most imaginative books I’ve ever read. It’s a part-factual, part-fictional account of a moment in the history of the Soviet Union when, briefly, it looked as though the fairy-tale that a centrally-planned economy could produce an abundance of good things might actually be true. It was a fairy tale, of course, and Francis Spufford has come up with a literary form that matches it.

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Quote of the Day

” In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”

• H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Parting Glass – Ceiliuradh at the Royal Albert Hall

Link

In April 2014, the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, paid the first State Visit of an Irish Head of State to the UK. On the concluding night of the visit, the President attended a remarkable celebration — called a Ceiliuradh in Irish — in the Albert Hall. The concert was produced by my friend Philip King, and ended with all of the artists who had participated singing The Parting Glass, a traditional way of bringing an evening to a close.

UK has another go at a contact-tracing app

According to The Register…

Britain’s NHS has released its second go at a contact-tracing app to help limit the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus infections, thanks in part to some help from the neighbors.

Limited trials of the smartphone app have begun on the Isle of Wight and in the London Borough of Newham, roughly two months after the first version of the software flamed out due to its failure to reliably keep track of the people you’ve been near, which is somewhat of an oversight for a program that’s supposed to warn you if you’ve been close to someone who tests positive.

In order to prevent a recurrence of the first app fiasco, it is understood that the UK government this time tapped up the Apple-Google decentralized API to reliably and efficiently perform the wireless contact tracing, which works on Android and iOS.

The report claims that the developers had help from Germany and Ireland. This won’t stop Boris Johnson claiming that it’s “world-leading”, though.

Summer reading #3

Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers by Cheryl Misak, OUP, 2020.

Frank Ramsey was a brilliant philosopher, mathematician and economist who died in 1930 at the age of 26 having made pathbreaking contributions to all three disciplines. He died from an illness contracted when he went swimming in the river Cam. Despite his youth, his intellectual contributions have been lasting and very influential. Paul Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics, said that “Frank Ramsey was a genius by all tests for genius”. Up to now there’s never been a biography for the general reader, which is hardly surprising given that Ramsey’s work was pretty abstruse. Despite that, though, Cheryl Misak has produced an amazingly readable and enjoyable biography without compromising on thoroughness. And it leaves one with an acute understanding of why Ramsey’s contemporaries were so devastated by his tragic and untimely death.

The joys of blogging

I’ve been blogging for a long time, and from the outset my working assumption was that it would be prudent to assume that on some of the topics I chose to cover there would be readers who knew more than me. And, broadly speaking, that’s been borne out over the years.

Recently, I became so fed up with the morning radio news programmes — particularly by the way the Johnson government has decided to hobble serious news outlets by refusing to let government ministers appear — that I decided it would be better for my sanity just to listen to music at breakfast and read the news in papers and on the Web. Hence the ‘Musical alternative’ at the top of each day’s blog.

Since then I’ve had a stream of great emails from readers with comments on music I’ve chosen and suggestions for other choices. Hugh Taylor, for example, wrote after the ‘James Joyce Playlist’ selection to suggest Beniamino Gigli singing in the bel canto style that Joyce so admired.

Ian Clark wrote about the track in which Paul Simon sang ‘American Tune’ and revealed something that I would never have known, namely that the tune was originally by Bach — which set me off on a hunt. My wife is a pianist and an organist and immediately recognised it as an Anglican hymn, “O sacred head’.

Then yesterday I had Leo Kottke playing another Bach tune, ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s desiring’ which I remembered hearing Kottke play at the Cambridge Folk Festival way back sometime in the 1970s. I couldn’t for the life of me remember which year, though. And then what should turn up in my email from Kevin Cryan this morning with an amazing link giving the date: July 28, 1979.

The great thing about blogging is the way it encourages humility in the blogger!

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Quote of the Day

Why is flying so bad? Because it takes a lot of energy to lift a metal bucket full of people and suitcases into the air. Go figure: a Boeing 747 burns more than 190 tons of kerosene for an average long-haul flight. With 410 people on board, that’s four bathtubs per passenger. Burning that fuel emits 530 tons of CO₂. That’s nearly 2.5 times the weight of the plane, all deposited in the atmosphere.

• Jelmer Mommers

Today’s musical alternative to Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme

The lark in the morning: Cillian Vallely (pipes) and Alan Murray (guitar). About 9 minutes.

Link

Uileann Pipes are my favourite musical instrument. Played well, they have a haunting beauty which can be sometimes exhilarating and sometimes elegiac. They are also ferociously difficult to play — the word ‘Uileann’ means ‘elbow’ in Irish, a reference to the way the musician inflates the bellows.

I love this comment below the video:

I can hardly guess what the guy who once invented the uilleann pipes was thinking… “Hmm let´s see: We have a chanter you have to use both hands to play it. We have that left elbow pumping the bellows, the right elbow to control the bag pressure to switch chanter octaves. The right knee to place the chanter on, where you have to (of course) occasionally lift it up from. So, how could I make this instrument any more difficult to play? Oh I know! Let´s invent some extra pipes you have to play with your right wrist and make them nearly impossible to keep in tune!” xD What a diabolic genius!

The Panopticon is already here

After George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” here comes the Axis of Autocracy. Ross Anderson has an interesting essay on how Xi Jinping is using artificial intelligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control—and exporting this technology to regimes around the globe.

Despite China’s considerable strides, industry analysts expect America to retain its current AI lead for another decade at least. But this is cold comfort: China is already developing powerful new surveillance tools, and exporting them to dozens of the world’s actual and would-be autocracies. Over the next few years, those technologies will be refined and integrated into all-encompassing surveillance systems that dictators can plug and play.

The emergence of an AI-powered authoritarian bloc led by China could warp the geopolitics of this century. It could prevent billions of people, across large swaths of the globe, from ever securing any measure of political freedom. And whatever the pretensions of American policy makers, only China’s citizens can stop it. I’d come to Beijing to look for some sign that they might.

This is a long, long read (7,500 words). But worth it if you have the time. Some of it is horrifying — especially the section on the persecution of the Uighur people. But it also makes one think about the future. It’s too simplistic to write off Western hostility to and suspicion of China as just hegemonic anxiety about having the world dominated not by the US, but by a new superpower. In the US, the threat of being overtaken and outclassed in AI and related technologies is regularly used by tech companies as the rationale for keeping them unregulated at home.

And there’s the deep irony that both superpowers are in the process of building surveillance states of unimaginable intrusiveness. The difference is that in China this is all controlled by the state, whereas in the West it’s happening via a strange amalgam of loosely regulated (or unregulated) tech companies and the connivance of the state which needs them to complement its own surveillance capabilities. So in the end, it all comes down to whether one believes (as Ross Anderson does) that in China the chances of this being stopped are essentially zero, whereas in the West (and the US) there’s some chance of the technology being regulated and brough under some kind of public control. Talk about a choice between evils.

Tom Loosemore on crappy website design

Tom Loosemore is the nearest thing the UK has to a guru on digital transformation of government services. In 2010 he founded the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS), and served as its deputy director for five years. And he led the project to create GOV.UK, the single website for UK Government, which has now received over 3 billion visits, and won the UK’s top design award in 2013. His blog is a source of insightful commentary on design issues.

I’ve just come on an example:

One sign that your website isn’t meeting the needs of all your users is when Matthew Somerville gets sufficiently grumpy about it to do a proper version himself.

Today Matthew released his own version of the UK Government’s official coronavirus data dashboard, which last week received a shiny revamp.

A shiny revamp that only worked after a bloated pile of client side javascript had been dumped in your browser (nearly a Mb of React).

A shiny revamp that didn’t initially publish the raw data, and when it did, broke any automated links to the actual data by rendering them via javascript. I imagine the data journalists doing great coronavirus work at the likes of the FT were thrilled.

Just to make the point forcefully, Matthew posted a little video showing the performance of the ‘official’ version alongside the performance of his rewritten version.

Link

You get the message?

Lovely stuff.

Kathleen MacMahon on the Irish women writers who were ignored at home but feted abroad

Wonderful essay. Samples:

Mary Lavin, or Grandmother (never Granny or Nana or, God forbid, Gran), made her name as a world-class short story writer from the unlikely setting of the Abbey Farm, near Navan, County Meath. The mother of three small children, she was widowed as a young woman, becoming a single mother and lone farmer in one fell swoop. While the male writers of her generation worked out of sight in holy sanctity, Grandmother took up a table in Bewley’s cafe on Grafton Street and wrote there until my mother and aunts joined her from school. In the evenings, the men gathered in the pubs around Baggot Street, while Grandmother cooked spaghetti bolognese and held court at her mews in nearby Lad Lane. If she broke the mould, it was for the simple reason that there was no other way for her to write and meet her peers. She had young children at home. Needs must.

And

Female writers, no less today than in my grandmother’s day, must find a way of working amid all this noise, and they do. Anne Lamott famously said that, before she had a child, she couldn’t write if there were dishes in the sink – but afterwards she could write if there was a corpse in the sink.

Unmissable.

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A flood of coronavirus apps are tracking us. Now it’s time to keep track of them.

Given that the pandemic is global you’d expect that the world and his dog is writing contact-tracing apps. And you’d be right.

MIT’s Tech Review had the good idea of creating a database of those currently in existence. Find it here.

When we began comparing apps around the world, we realized there was no central repository of information; just incomplete, constantly changing data spread across a wide range of sources. Nor was there a single, standard approach being taken by developers and policymakers: citizens of different countries were seeing radically different levels of surveillance and transparency.

So to help monitor this fast-evolving situation, we’re gathering the information into a single place for the first time with our Covid Tracing Tracker—a database to capture details of every significant automated contact tracing effort around the world.

We’ve been working with a range of experts to understand what we need to look at, pulling sources including government documents, announcements, and media reports, as well as talking directly to those who are making these apps to understand the technologies and policies involved.

It’s work in progress. But work that’s well worth doing.

Facebook’s ‘supreme court’

Here we go again. Facebook, a toxic tech company that suffers from the delusion that it’s a nation-state, has had another go at pretending that it is. Originally, you will recall, it was going to create a global currency called Libra and in effect become banker to the world. Strangely, a world that normally seems hypnotised by Facebook didn’t think much of that idea (after all, who would trust Facebook with money?) and my guess is that the project is effectively evaporating until it becomes just another variant of PayPal, which is not quite what Facebook’s Supreme Leader, Mark Zuckerberg, had in mind.

Nothing daunted, though, Zuck has had another hubristic idea. On the grounds that Facebook is the world’s largest information-exchange Autocracy (population 2.4B) he thinks that it should have its own Supreme Court. (Yes, that’s the expression he originally used: later and wiser councils persuaded him that that might be just a tad too hubristic). So it’s now just an ‘Oversight Board for Content Decisions’, complete with its own Charter and a 40-strong Board of Big Shots who will, apparently, have the power “to reverse Facebook’s decisions about whether to allow or remove certain posts on the platform.” Sounds impressive, doesn’t it. But it looks rather less so when you realise what it will actually be doing. It’s actually a Board for Locking the Stable Door After the Horses Have Bolted.

The names of twenty of the 40 aforementioned Big Shots have just been announced. The big puzzle at the moment is why some apparently sane people with reputations to lose would have chained themselves to this particular Catherine Wheel. Apart from anything else, they have committed themselves to endorsing Zuckerberg’s hubristic delusions about the central importance of Facebook to the world.

One big surprise (for me, anyway) was that Alan Rusbridger, the sainted former Editor of the Guardian and a genuine, 24-carat journalistic hero, should have lent his name and reputation to this circus. In an essay on Medium he’s offered a less-than-convincing justification. “In the eyes of some”, he writes, the Oversight Board

is one of the most significant projects of the digital age, “a pivotal moment” in the words of Evelyn Douek, a young scholar at Harvard, “when new constitutional forms can emerge that will shape the future of online discourse.”

Others are unconvinced. Some, inevitably, will see it as a fig leaf.

Another Harvard academic, Dipayan Ghosh, believes the Oversight Board’s powers are too narrowly drawn. He thinks the Board’s authority should be expanded from content takedowns to the more critical concerns at the heart of the company itself. “We need oversight of the company’s data practices to promote consumer and citizen privacy,” he has written, adding: “oversight of the company’s strategic acquisitions and data governance to protect against anticompetitive practice; and oversight of the company’s algorithmic decision — making to protect against bias.”

I’m in the fig leaf camp. As Charles Arthur, a grizzled veteran of tech commentary observed on his website,

“I’d be wary of quite how overruled Zuckerberg can be. And how long he’ll tolerate it. What if the board says that any physical abuse video should be taken down? That factchecked-as-wrong content should be removed, not just downranked?”

Yep. Meanwhile the best antidote to being seduced by this preposterous charade is a simple mantra: Facebook is just a commercial company — like Exxon. And all it needs is to be cut down to size.

Why the porn industry has a lot to teach us about safety in the Covid-19 era

Well, well… Who’d have thought it?

As states and employers furiously develop plans to safely reopen workplaces in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, they’re grappling with what seems like an endless list of questions: where to test, who to test, and how often to test for the virus? Further complicating matters are issues of workers’ privacy, geography, politics, science, and cost. It’s a difficult mandate. But there is one place to look for guidance — the adult film industry.

Since the late 1990s, when an outbreak of HIV infections threatened to shutter the multibillion-dollar industry, the mainstream porn community has implemented procedures that require all performers to be tested for HIV and a host of other sexually transmitted infections every 14 days before they can be cleared to work. Any HIV-positive test leads to an immediate shutdown of all U.S. sets, followed by detailed contact tracing before sets can reopen. While not perfect, those in the industry say the nationwide PASS program works to protect thousands of performers, ensures safer workplaces, and curtails the spread of disease.

Wonder what SAGE makes of that?

Quarantine diary — Day 49

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